The journal includes information in keeping with the character of an expedition log, such as weather, travel conditions, the progress of work, and descriptions of locations and specimens including fossils, fish, and minerals.

The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University holds at least some of the specimens collected by the expedition. The fossils are held by the Division of Invertebrate Paleontology.

Addison Emery Verrill (1839-1926) earned his Harvard SB summa cum laude in 1862 and an honorary AM from Yale in 1867. He joined an expedition to Anticosti in the summer between his junior and senior years at Harvard. He was Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Entomology at the University of Wisconsin from 1868 to 1870. He was Yale University's first Professor of Zoology, serving there from 1864-1907.

Complementary material in the Harvard University Archives consists of Verrill's Diary, 1860-1862 (HUD 860.90). That diary lacks summer 1861, which this diary covers.